Thursday, March 15, 2012

When Obama was trying to get elected and gas prices were at $4 a gallon, he used to say "Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling, America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves."

Now, Obama claims "With only 2% of the world's oil reserves, we can't just drill our way to lower gas prices. Not when we consume 20% of the world's oil."

Investors Business Daily, using figures from the Energy Information Administration, Department of Energy, Rand Corporation, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management, and the Institute for Energy Research, provides data that directly contradicts Barack Obama's claims to the American people.

What America really has:

• The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world's proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves "are a small subset of recoverable resources," because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.

• At least 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf yet to be discovered, according to the government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

• About 24 billion barrels in shale deposits in the lower 48 states, according to EIA.

• Up to 2 billion barrels of oil in shale deposits in Alaska's North Slope, says the U.S. Geological Survey.

• Up to 12 billion barrels in ANWR, according to the USGS.

• As much as 19 billion barrels in the Utah tar sands, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

• A separate Rand Corp. study found that about 800 billion barrels of oil shale in Wyoming and neighboring states is "technically recoverable," which means it could be extracted using existing technology. That's more than triple the known reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Click image to enlarge

The conclusion:

All told, the U.S. has access to 400 billion barrels of crude that could be recovered using existing drilling technologies, according to a 2006 Energy Department report.

When you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the Institute for Energy Research, enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.

When all is said and done, it comes down to politics preventing us from utilizing all of our own oil supply and it is summed up eloquently by Dan Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research who says "We've embargoed our own supplies."

A sitting president has access to all this data, yet Obama continues to make claims that are demonstratively false every time he speaks to the issue.

When Obama and liberals are presented with the facts and figures they fall back on the argument that nothing will help in the short term, which is an argument they have been making for years, yet we would be years closer to the solution if we had opened our resources up and delaying doing so will continue to delay becoming energy independent.

In a recent Washington Post-ABC News Poll the highest level of disapproval of Barack Obama out of six key issues asked about, was his job performance on gas prices to which 65 percent of Americans either somewhat or strongly disapproved of his handling of the issue.

Obama is aware of how gas prices and his handling of the issue is harming his reelection chances so he is stumping all over the place and using his 2% line, but the public is not buying his excuses, explanations, justifications or outright lies.

There is 60 times more resources in America than Obama is admitting to and that is a conservative estimate because as the original IBD article explains:

And even this number could be low, since such estimates tend to go up over time.

Back in 1995, for example, the USGS figured there were 151 million barrels of oil in North Dakota's Bakken formation. In 2008, it upped that estimate to 3 billion barrels to 4.3 billion barrels — a 25-fold increase. Now, some oil analysts say there could be as much as 20 billion barrels there.